I think I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time… and finally… I just did!

Gotta admit I’ve always been scared of needles & pain – I can’t even remember how it felt to get my ears pierced since it was done when I was a baby… so this was the second piercing in my entire life – but I wanted to overcome fear once again and just prepared myself for it to be a good experience. Naveen helped of course – he is such good moral support. He just tells me to stop worrying & thinking… demands it more like… and so I begin to believe him … that it will be fine.

When we entered the “tattoo & piercing” store I hadn’t been so sure… no matter how positively I had prepared my mind. It all started becoming real to me… especially when the receptionist told us to go down the hallway and to the right where the jewelery for the piercing could be picked out. There in the glass cabinet sat all these beautiful sparkly gems at the head of these long thin pin-like structures. Wonderful! I began to imagine pain like a nail being hammered into my poor little button nose. I picked out the medium sized clear diamond screw (yeah “screw” … not stud… lol.. that’s why I thought of carpentry work) – and as I held the tiny metal object between my fingers I found myself wondering out loud, “how does all that fit in my nose?”. The guy who was going to do the piercing looked at me directly and answered the question I thought I had only said in my mind.. “we bend it”. Great! Not only was this nail going to be hammered in… somehow he was going to bend metal inside my nostrils! lol.

Anyways… so I filled out the disclaimer paperwork that ‘forever’ saved them from being sued by me if any harm or scar ended up on my face, as well as a whole heaps of other questions that I initialed my signature next to… including one that said I had asked all the questions I wanted to and had gotten answers I was happy with before the procedure. Hmm… I still had one burning silly question on my mind.. and this time I needed to purposefully ask him before he began… since of course I had signed on the dotted line that I had asked everything I wanted to. So i handed over the papers and began with…

“So how exactly are you going to do this?”

To which he answers..

“Well I’ll just swab alcohol to disinfect the area, mark the exact spot where the piercing will be, we’ll agree on it and then I’ll pierce it”

I was thinking… ok… you didn’t answer how you’re going to pierce my nose! I think I wanted him to give me a detail by detail account of that moment that he so lightly spoke about just a second ago.Hmm.. needed to just come to the point.

“Will it hurt?”

I never expected what he replied next…

” Do you want it to hurt?”

“No”

“Then i’ll do it so it won’t”

WOW! If only I could trust God so easily sometimes… but in that split second all my nervousness vanished as I placed my trust in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing.. detail by detail… and had done this so many times before… and reassured me I would get only what I could bear… a painless piercing.

So with that he led me into the sterile piercing room with my husband following not far behind for moral support.

And I sat down… and like he had told me he would… I got swabbed (it stung a bit here like you could expect from pure alcohol on your skin), I got marked (by a tiny ink dot using a toothpick), we agreed upon the mark (although my own thinking was questioning whether it should be higher up so that my little diamond would sit exactly at the end of the swirl on my left nostril – he obviously knew what he was doing and so we three agreed to let him pierce it right at the thinnest point) and then I got pierced! All I felt was something warm go inside my nose exactly under the area he was going to pierce, he then asked me to take a deep breathe, he pierced the metal through that felt like less than a pin prick of pain (therefore.. painless) and suddenly it was done and he asked me to exhale slowly… WOW! I dunno about you…if you have ever got your nose pierced.. or even had your first ear piercing recently… but it was a cool experience for me.

My Naveen told me it would be fine.. and whad’ya know? it was!

“Will it hurt?” Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But something changed in me today… became free… like the willow tree figurine standing with arms spread in happiness.